Kid Craft: Oatmeal Drum

Learn how to make a drum for a child out of a leftover oatmeal container.

Little kids like to play instruments, but they are often rough with these instruments because they do not know how to play the instruments properly. If you have a child who likes to play the drums, but the child is too young for a real drum set, try making this craft with your child.

For this project, you will need one empty oatmeal canister, paint, paintbrushes, glue, string, and unsharpened pencils. The canister should be the cylindrical kind and not the box kind. Have your child paint the outside of the canister but not the top! Suggest to your child that he or she should paint a pattern on the side of the canister that he or she might find on the side of a drum. Let the paint dry while you are completing the next step.

In order to make the drum sticks, you will need two unsharpened pencils and some thick yarn. Start wrapping the yarn around the eraser part of the pencil, overlapping it like a ball of yarn. This will be the mallet end of the drum stick. The more yarn you use, the quieter the sound will be when the drum sticks hit the drum, so use your parental discretion! If you want a quiet drum, use more yarn; if you want to give your child the freedom to make a lot of noise, use less yarn.

When paint on the bottom portion of the canister has dried, put on the top of the canister. This will be the face of the drum. You can choose to glue the top of the canister to the bottom if you wish. This will prevent the loss of one part of the drum.

The last step in making the drum is making a harness so that your child can wear the drum while playing it. This can be done in two ways. You can punch a hole on either side of the drum, insert string, and tie a knot on the inside of the drum (make sure you do this before you glue the lid of the canister to the base of the canister!). This will make a strap that can go over your child's shoulder while he or she plays. Poking holes into the side of the drum may change the sound slightly, but there is a method that does not involved poking holes into the drum. To do this, tie a piece of string all the way around the drum. Next, attach another string to this string, similar to how you would attach the string by poking holes. Tie knots to secure the string. You now have harness and strap for the drum! You can reinforce the harness by crisscrossing strings along the bottom of the drum and tying them to the string that goes around the drum. This will keep the drum from slipping through the harness. You drum is now complete! Enjoy the music that your child makes with his or her own new instrument!